I'm exiting an Opera session that has been running basically 'foreever.' Well, no, it has crashed, but then opera is clever and reloads your pre-crash tabs. So here are links:

http://whatthehack.org/ big hacker campout in the Netherlands this summer

http://nakedape.cc/about Naked Ape consulting in Portland, Free and Open Source consultants, Friends (?) of Rael.

http://scienceview.berkeley.edu/view/index.html Web cam from the top of the berkeley hills, of the Bay. Very cool

http://davidchess.com/words/log.20050107.html#20050111 Zen Enlightenment by using analytical discourse to transcend analytical discourse. Very good.

http://flagrantdisregard.com/?p=344Map of sex offenders, near Disneyland, and interesting blog

http://doineedajacket.com/dinaj.asp?dinaj=KSFO The most important of personal services...Do I need a jacket? Yes Why? Because it's not very warm out.

http://teryx.bobdbob.com/~protius/ledbutton/ An LED lapel button project

(a putrid long url) Schuyler's map of terms from the History of the Peloponnesian War.

http://interaccess.org/ia.php Yet another Electronic media arts centre...now, how come we aint got one of those in Sebastopol?

A picture Dav Coleman took of me...that I like at all, at the Dorkbot at The Shipyard in Oakland...Jim Mason's little pied a terre.

http://www.lfcs.inf.ed.ac.uk/reports/91/ECS-LFCS-91-180/ The Polyadic pi-Calculus: A Tutorial

Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog Islands of Belgium in the Netherland, islands of belgium inside of islands of the netherlands inside of whatever...a text.

Baarle-Hertog Islands - map

A place Jerritt lived and the carrot cannon, with a moin moin map

The Regex Coach - Interactive regular expressions-very cool

Molly came up annoyed, sad, irritated. Yesterday one of her fish died, today after school two more were dead. She went to Adam's to console herself, and when she got back two more were dead, and two of the last four are looking 'off.'

We bought eleven or twelve fish at a new fish store after christmas, and 10 have died. Including all five of the little's fish in their new Aquarium.

They got new fish that were diseased and didn't quarntine them, or they have bad management practices, or pumps that share supply lines, or shared nets. Who knows.

But Molly is bummed. And it makes me sad.

Maddy was hanging in when the fish started to die, but when the last one died she ripped in two her beautiful picture of the aquarium showing the five little fish, tetras?, in a school.

In Pebble she did an ocean picture that had five fish in a school. I asked her if they were supposed to be a reminder of our fish, and she became pedantic, telling me no, that this picture was of the ocean...but then she added more fish to the school to get away from that magic number 'five.'

Madeline said. I tried to make a volcano with Baking Soda and vinegar but it didn't work.

Oh? Show me what you used.

I used that baking soda, and that dried vinegar.

Dried vinegar?

Yeah, right there (points at bottle of Fuller's Mendocino herbs Basil).

Ah. I think I see the problem. Vinegar is not actually dried...

And we proceeded to make baking soda and vinegar bubble like mad. I remember in 4th grade I had grand plans to make a baking soda and vinegar rocket. I showed my drawings to ?? Ms Milaneseo?? at Grant. I was a big 4th grader, at San Antonio Elementary, just dropping in to show her what I was up to.

Of course...now Grant is a community center, and San Antonio is a Jewish community center, and so is (?) in Los Gatos where I did first and second grades...

The day after Christmas Spencer's radio control car from Radio Shack broke. He cried. I tried to fix it. Finally couldn't, and Heather suggested taking it back.

Radio Shack was incredibly unhelpful. I'm pretty disgusted at them, actually. But this evening I spent three hours hours working on the toy. I have been fabricating a new part to replace the broken one.

This is what happens when you start watching Monster Garage. But I digress :-)

I'm not positive that I can make it work again, but it is looking good.

In addition to the initial problem, it never actually worked right. One of the two controls is exceptionally flaky. I'm not sure what to think about that problem. Looking at the board in the car there are a lot of really ugly solder joints. I think there may be crossed traces. I'm not sure I want to dig into that right now...maybe if I can get the first problem fixed.

Today I bought a set of dremal bits, and I used a number of them. Fabrication takes a long time, but it is pretty satisfying.

Maddy came up and asked about King Cobras. "How big do they get?" Well, I answered, did mommy bring in my backpack? No, she hadn't, but she had left the car that included my pack.

Off Maddy went to fetch up my pack with computer and we explored the King Cobra. The biggest one ever was over 18 feet long! And they are often 12 feet! Then we had a problem: my bath was almost overflowing. With HOT water! And the drain is way down at the bottom! So I put in a _little_ bit of cold, then psyched myself like a sumo wrestler and plunged my hand into the depths.

Now we love our deep Japanese 'soaking tub.' You can sit on the bench and have water to your neck. Delightful. And two people can share the tub, assuming that they are close, since they will be close. But it has a flaw. The drain is not easy to open.

Not easy at all! In fact, it can take a bunch of tries to get it to open. It has a silly mechanism. You push it down to close, then you push it past close and it is supposed to spring up to open. Hah.

So there I am, with my chest pressed against the top of the top, stretched down to try please please to release the drain so that I could let some of the scalding hot (not literally, but sort of close) water out so that I could put a bit of cold in so a bath could be obtained, push, clunk, still closed, push, clunk, still closed, push, clunk, still closed.

I do not need any help at this point, when Maddy chimed in "Daddy, you look like a poooping gorrilla."

...that about says it all, doesn't it? I worked on a sculpture yesterday...

A nice bicycle but not for long.

Things progressed...read about it on yesterday's photo page..

"...instead I end up with a ball point pen up my nose sculpting animals out of a coffee stirrer saying 'can I go yet?'"

Olympus wants me to agree that 'Analysis, reverse engineering, a decompile, and carrying out a dissassembly are forbidden about every portion of this software, DLL, or this software. Printing of the combination with this software and other applications, inclusion, and this software is also forbidden.'

First, that is just the worst English I have read in a while. Second, there are no DLL's in a Mac program, and Third, I've already reverse engineered part of the DSS file format. Seems right for me to do so. But importantly, I absolutely refuse to grant them those rights. I assert that since they are selling Voice Recorders which are used to capture the data about my life that I have every moral right to do anything that I need to do in order to maintain access to my thoughts and words and voice recordings that are stored in their file format.

That means that I specifically reject their claims of copyright over the software that they wrote. If they would like to publish the spec for DSS files then I will accept their moral rights to lock me out of their software.

But they have not done so, and I assert that since the only way to get access to my own data is to use their software, or to reverse engineer their software in order to write my own, that I have the right to reverse engineer their software.

Actually...I was most annoyed because at first I read 'DLL' as 'DSS' and thought they were telling me I couldn't do what I had already done when I wrote the Perl module Audio::DSS. The thing about open source software is that freedom truly is important.

Free wireless for everyone in San Francisco

"Gavin Newsom has set a goal of providing free wireless Internet activity in his city that sees itself as a vanguard of the Internet revolution.

"No San Franciscan should be without a computer and a broadband connection."

Why do I have that written on a random piece of paper? Please tell me if you have some idea of what this means. Thank you.

"A. N. Whitehead's famous quote goes, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."

Networks of zombied machines controlled by 'bot nets are just, well, cool. Of course they are wrong, and people should not take over other people's computers, etc, but the sheer idea, the audacity, is entertaining.

This BBC article "Have hackers recruited your PC?" reports on recent work by the Honeynet Project in tracking bot networks. The Honeynet project motto is "To learn the tools, tactics, and motives involved in computer and network attacks, and share the lessons learned."

Schuyler forwarded this as an 'interesting meme.' Shifting Baselines.

What does "shifting baselines" mean?
A baseline is a reference point from the past -- how things used to be. If we allow these reference points to shift we lose track of our standards, and eventually accept the degraded state as being "natural."

Since we know this came from Schuyler, and I am posting it here, we can make some guesses about which reference points are of interest. And I happen to mostly agree with their message. As a diver I know that tiny fish are not the norm...but I am a tad worried since there are a huge number of things that we used to accept as "natural" that fill me with horror. And we've got some cultural battles going on right now in which 'my' side is arguing that things should a certain way because that would be right, and the other side is arguing that things should be a certain way because there way is "natural."

Which in an odd way brings up this quote I keep hearing about 'judicial tyranny.' Which appears to be the phrase given to decisions with which one disagrees, assuming that one has certain beliefs...

"Reasonable people can disagree about [issue x], but I think we can all agree that these decisions should be made in the legislative arena" (a near to correct quote, and a common meme). Uh...no, actually I really strongly disagree. Brown vs. Board of Education was the right decision, and the people now crying 'Judicial Tyranny' are the same folks who were opposed to Brown.

"Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever" was the wrong decision...

A personal MBA program? do you need to go to school to learn the thinss you learn in an MBA program? if you get inside Josh Kaufman's bald head and read a bunch of books, you don't. Josh links to Seth Godin who thinks

An MBA has become a two-part time machine. First, the students are taught everything they need to know to manage a company from 1990, and second, they are taken out of the real world for two years while the rest of us race as fast as we possibly can.

Seth acknowledges that he does have a fancy MBA, from Stanford, so while we in the autodidactic through entropy camp can cheer the idea that reading a 'few' books is in many respects just as good as getting a fancy degree that cheer is tempered by the observation that 'those schooled' people probably have special meetings where they plot strategy, and spread the idea that you don't 'need' to get the MBA, in order to reduce the competition among our MBA robot masters.

Or would that be paranoia?

(Seth Godin's site is interesting)

Hitler our Secular Satan The Antrhopik Network provides 'Ecology, Anarchy and Primitfifm from the Tribe of Anthropik. And is sort of entertaining. An interesting feature? Each post has a summary, and then a word count along with an estimate of how long it will take to read...sort of an attention conservation notice.

on another topic...when you need to write a detailed email, you should write the email, and then write a second email telling someone why they should read your first email, and only send the second one...

http://www.wagonmaker.com/index.html

The Voice of Fire! Flames used as speakers. Very very cool.

I've set up a Wiki for my golf cart project. Feel free to comment.

What a good time for all! Carving pumpkins underwater is a challenge!

The pumpkin shown won third prize, a copy of the Diver's Almanac to the pacific coast, from Baja to Washington or Canada or somewhere north of here.

Tom Stone, of Bamboo Reef, grilled up hot dogs and burgers. Spencer (shown at left) ate FOUR HOT DOGS! We also took jack the dog, who had a lovely time.

The only down side is that Molly has two weeks of homework to catch up on since she was in England, and this is not going to be her evening to catch up on it! She has been asleep for hours already (and it is not yet seven pm).

Poor Molly! Pipe through the leg, gushing wound. I warned her not to unicycle through the scrap metal, but would she listen to me? No! Of course not! And now she has a freaking pipe right through her leg. That is the reward you get for trying to unicycle on an I-Beam 'bridge' over a pile of scrap metal!

Here is my foo camp wiki. It is primarily for my own notes (and because Kwiki's are cool), but feel free to edit.

Oh yeah, and here is a 'shout out' to my main man Matt Westervelt and his 16 photos site.

"Oh, people just want you to change reality."

phone in a boot...if you give away too much.

"Kris, it is damn good to see you"

"Rich, it is good to see you too."

"Yes...but unlike you, I'm sincere." 8/7/02

"Money makes us all liars" Adam Flahraty

dogs in heat brand... (what? Muffins?)

"Did you just call him 'Radio Shoe'?" I asked Jonathan

"No...but I wish I had." jonathan fields

arno corp.com Seen on a bumper sticker at a view spot in Utah.

"It's not the end of the world. Breaking a nail is the end of the world " Molly 12/23/01

"Those smelly old dogs are giving me a head ache" Maddy 11/21/01 about our Jack and visiting Tuck from next door.

Snippets of my 'product training' while working for the show place...

"Cork and latex footbed"
"Do you have your cork life?"
"Deep cushioned heel cup"
pronation, sublimating (why side of shoe wears off)
"entire arch support system"
"toe bar" "stretch grip stretch grip motion"
"heel cup arch support and toe bar"
german sizes
fitting the foot bed more than the rest of the foot
in whatever training, in any product, the little buzz words

"Those are the kinds of ideas I hear and I think 'that just sounds dangerous,' but I'd be interested to hear Tom's opinion."

Heather...9/22/02 during Molly and Rich's birthday celebration.

From http://howtoons.net (This is a copy of what I wrote on the Oreilly Net wiki "Howtoons are a viral form of engineering education and excitement. Each is a project in a cartoon for kids to build, play and learn with. Even better, they are fun adventures within themselves."

If you want to have open source hardware, you need to educate the next generation of kids to be hardware hackers. How do you do that? The howtoons answer is to excite the kids with the proper mix of education and danger.

Saul showed us an excerpt from the book Handycrafts for handy boys. A little project called "How to build a glider." The idea was that 12 year old boys could spend their time making a glider. It included a stunning drawing (http://zeroprestige.org/craftoons/archives/reference/glider2.html) of a boy on this glider preparing to jump off of a cliff over the railroad tracks (complete with steam locomotive), over a river and crashing into the church steeple.

Compared with this inspiration, my "friend's" little project involving magnesium ribbon tied to a hydrogen balloon hardly rates.

The Howtoons idea is to reinterpret this genre and bring it to the present. Each 'lesson' is an adventure, an education, a project, and a story in a small comic strip.

Make a vortex cannon and blow out your birthday candles from across the room. Make a model hovercraft from a CD and balloon. Make a rocket with a bicycle pump and soda bottle.

Or a water drop microscope. Or demonstrating fibre optics with a small laster and a plastic jug of water leaking a urine shaped stream (well, okay, under normal forces of gravity, all streams of water are urine shaped). The stream glows a nice green color, and let to all manner of mituration humor.

"I've found that with kids you can't go to low." And off he was on a discussion of our views of childhood, then and now. Until the late 18th century, kids were thought to be small people with evil within. The evil needed to be drained, and presumably hard work was the catalyst for expulsion. Now, all empirical evidence to the contrary, we view children as innocent creature, only later corrupted by the evils of society. But even now our efforts have the stated goal of keeping the innocence in, and the bad out.

Personally, I want to keep and encourage the 'natural' mischevious quality, while shielding the kids from the general societal evil as long as possible. But that is me, not Saul talking.

Or, or, or. They are always looking for more ideas for strips. Everyone has a good hardware hack or two from their childhood, and those freaks out at 6 sigma may have 50 of them, but they need more! "The threshold for drafts is incredibly low," so check out their site and send in your ideas!

He also showed some clips from zeroprestige.com that center around kite surfing and kite surfing on ice. "It's a lot less dangerous than it looks."

Greg Apodaca is a photographer and digital retoucher He has samples of his work with a cool mouse over 'before and after' effect. So for those who have ever doubted the power of photoshop...

I find The Bikini Example especially instructive. Basically I find the before shots far more interesting, human, sexy, than the after bits of airbrushed fluff.

But this is not a criticism directed at Greg! Hell no! As he says, it is the call of the Art Director.

Long ago I wrote a turbo pascal program that used a genetic algorithm in order to solve an actual problem that a friend had. then I did a bit of research on the subject, and then let it sort of sit in the background...

Via Bruce Sterling's weblog I got turned onto This article in Discover Magazine about genetic algorithms.

One of the cooler examples is a company called Natural Motion that has created 'Active Character Technology.' They created a playground for stick figures to play, and evolve using genetic algorithms. They have sample movies on the subject. But this simple animation is my favorite.

Moving beyond evolving the ability to walk the article talks about developing machines via genetic algorihtms.

"Let's say you give the software access to the entire McMaster-Carr industrial supply catalog. They have 400,000 parts in stock: screws, bolts, hinges, everything. So you've got the whole gene pool of those parts available." Somewhere in that mix is the machine you're dreaming of, and simulated evolution may well be the fastest way to find it.

"You state your objectives, let the thing evolve with the optimum combination of parts at the lowest price, and the machine will be there this afternoon," Gross says, his voice rising with excitement. "That's an extreme exaggeration but not that extreme!"

I've set up a Wiki here. If you go to that link, you can add and edit content.

Sort of interesting...

I don't (yet) see how to group content, as Blosxom does with directories...but I have the code, so if I care...

A clean living healthy cow makes real good yogurt...the inference is that dirty dead cows make crappy yogurt. It's your choice. Make it wisely.

A frustrated Spencer could not get his dad to understand his underwear demands, so finally he grabbed a teddy bear off the shelf, and pointed at it's nose. "It is this color (black)" and then he pointed at a pair of boxer briefs of the wrong color, "and it is one of these."

Houston, we have cognition.

Last week we were talking about a friend of Molly's. Someone said that he was a bit of a whacko, and Heather said "He's probably a lot like your daddy was in high school."

Spencer looked at me and asked "Daddy, were you a whacko in high school?"

And we have syllogisms!

What a guy!

I am descended from a proud line of pioneers... Here is some of my family history information

Last Year's Emerging Technology Conference was a head splitting experience. Hanging out with all the cool kids, listening to things with my eyes wide open and jaw slack, a spot of drool coming out the side.

And this year was even more amazing. Tuesday evening Schuyler said "Tomorrow could be the most intellectually stimulating day of our lives." I recoil from the hyperbola of others (while dishing out my own with reckless abandon), but schuyler was not far from the mark.

I'm working on projects as a result of ETech...there is code to write, and devices to make, and people to contact, and worlds to create. I suspect that this will come out on this page 'Real Soon Now.'

I'm sitting in the 'Lab' listening to Peace Orchrestra, hacking nocat mapping code for our talk at E-Tech next week, drinking a very nice bottle of Merlot and just loving life!

Great Kids, a sexy wife who I love, interesting work, fascinating and engaging hobbies, a community of people who share my interests. My life could not be better!

What if you could dump garbage into a machine, and get back high quality oil, Gas, Carbon and metal solids, and water?

It appears that you can With a process called 'thermal depolymerization process,' or TDP.

If it has carbon in it, this machine will break it down, make oil and gas, and assorted clean and pure minerals. I love this process! In the midst of the worst excesses of Crony Capitalism, Bush Style, this represents the side of Free Markets that is most powerful!

I accept the criticism that I am pollyanish, in the extreme, but damn it, I am! Technology perhaps can not solve the problems that it creates. Except...maybe it can.

I was home alone with Spencer and Maddy. Spencer woke up, crying, sad. I worked with him, held him, didn't hold him, got him apple juice, picked up the apple juice when he threw it on the floor, and finally I asked him "Are you asleep or awake?"

He said he was awake. So asked him how did he know he wasn't dreaming?

And he answered "a dream is when you are asleep and bubbles come out of your head."

And you just can't argue with that logic.

Earlier in the day we were at Howarth park. Molly has been trying to keep up with Jeff Boyett's unicycling, and so here we see the big bruise from trying, and failing, to hop up, catch the peddle on a ledge, and stay (or fall, as the case may be).

The Testing Range has always been a personal test bed for rather ugly bits of crap. I had other places (journals online) for prettified writing and stuffs... But now Testing Range is being used...people come here for the skinny on my reality. This format, subject to change as it is, contains all the relevant links from the old home page, plus gives me a place to post updates. I first set up Bloxsom in March of 2002, posted a half dozen quasi links and then moved to some other momentary infatuation.